The pre’s got Mojo: a developer speaks about Palm’s new SDK

Ars talks with a developer who has used the SDK for the newly announced Palm …

Thursday Palm announced its next-generation foray into mobile computing with a one-two hardware/software punch at CES 2009. The company talked about its new mobile phone platform called pr? that combines impressive hardware and a new operating system, called WebOS, that runs on the device. The name is appropriate; all the software running on the device is a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Friday, Palm revealed a little more information about how developers will build applications on the phone, covering local storage and how messaging between applications and data stores will happen on the device:

By leveraging the local storage capabilities of HTML5 so that data is available even when users are offline

By using a JSON-based message bus to tap into a wide range of device services, including contacts, calendars, and location

Got your Mojo risin'

In its Friday release, Palm also confirms its support for running background tasks and gracefully handling notifications that don't interrupt the user's context. They also note a rapid development framework called Mojo that helps developers get more work done by taking the grunt work out of common tasks.

Unfortunately Palm is currently not opening this developer program to the public and has only released the Mojo framework and SDK to a private group of developers.

On Thursday, we were contacted by a developer who has used and is familiar with the Mojo SDK; he had a lot of good things to say about how Palm is handing the extremely nascent developer community and his hopes for the future of the platform. The developer told us that he has explored mobile development on Apple's iPhone SDK and found much of the company's position towards their community to be "developer-hostile"—an obvious reference to their insistence on enforcing a pointless NDA well past its expiration date and their strong hand in regulating what can and cannot be developed for its platform.

Photo by Jon Snyder, Wired.com

In stark contrast, it seems that this developer's experience with the Mojo SDK has been a joy. The platform will allow developers to access most of the phone's capabilities, including calendaring, contacts, music and video playback. It would appear that Palm is very open to allowing developers nearly full access to the device's capabilities.

pre: the anti-iPhone

Our developer also tells us that Palm is open to things Apple usually frowns upon, including running notification and periodic tasks in the background, providing direct access to the phone's text messaging (SMS) system, and more.

Perhaps the part our anonymous contact was most excited about was Palm's extensive use of open standards throughout the entire development stack. This is yet another point where Palm's development model appears to be the antithesis of Apple's iPhone model. Palm's inclusion of the Mojo MVC framework is one of the developer's favorite features—perhaps even better is that it's optional and you can build your own from scratch if you prefer. According to our contact, the Mojo framework is extremely nice, well thought out, and significantly improves the speed and efficiency of developing mobile applications on the pr?.

All of this, paired with Palm's excellent new UI and the impressive hardware specifications, has seemed to help people forget about Palm's troubled past and has, at least for now, put them back on the road to delivering a successful mobile product.